The legend of the Mayflower has been taught to Americans from grade school through graduate school. Yet, the history of the first permanent colony in North America has been taught more as legend than truth. Now comes Nathaniel Philbrick's work which looks at this story from the vantage point of the native Indians and shines the light of reality on the real story of the Mayflower.

As the Pilgrims sailed along the Cape Cod coast looking for a suitable landing, they found signs of human activity at every turn. They witnessed villages, cemeteries, storage pits, etc., but where were the natives? Philbrick claims that European germs had spread faster than the foreigners themselves. The newcomers had arrived in a land that once had witnessed surging populations in viable and prosperous communities. Now, the land appeared desolate and disease had ravaged and demoralized the remaining native population.

With the new arriving Pilgrims and with them a new wave of disease outbreaks among the unprotected Indians, the result created a political firestorm among the natives. The Pilgrims failed to realize they had disembarked into the middle of a complex political and military dispute among the native tribes. A dispute that would force them into stockades and into years of confrontations, misunderstandings, compromises, and ultimately war with the natives.

The significant event that brought culmination to the Mayflower story occurs in 1675. That year brought King Philip's War, considered the most brutal war fought in North America. The end result was the Indians were the losers and as a result they were deported as the first American slaves on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.